Better Watch What You Say

Well, I guess I'm going to have my parenting license revoked for sure this time. I was letting Avery hang around with me while I caught up on my Grey's Anatomy from last night, and she happened to hear this: ". . . I'm never going to have sex again . . .". Oops -- but all was okay. She got really excited and started yelling "he's going to have a birthday, he's going to have a birthday!" What in the world could she be talking about, I wondered. "He's going to have a birthday, he's never going to be six again!!" I'll be sad when the hilarious toddler comments disappear.

Phew, having dodged a bullet on that one, I sent her to help Devon vacuum out the car instead of hovering around the PG-13 (NOT PG-3) show.

Another favorite right now is " in the first place. . . ." She never has a second place to follow up with, so everything is always first: In the first place, we didn't have a red hat tea party at Melba's today. In the first place, I'm not really hungry right now. Just trying it out, I suppose.

Other favorites: I still love blue blankie, even though he "changed my whole life" and this is the biggest piece of chalk "in the whole wide world." She'll pick up one of these phrases somewhere and won't let go of them -- like a rottweiler on a kitten. Sometimes they make sense, often they don't.

We always get a good laugh when she's trying out new phrases, but one that isn't so funny is "I barfed, I barfed." Unfortunately, we heard that around 10:00pm on Thursday night. It seems to have stemmed from dinner & nothing more long-lasting (perhaps the blue-dyed easter egg wasn't such a good choice, and yes, it was blue on the outside and in). At least when Jordan barfs there aren't chunks that need to be pre-washed in a sink. . . . By this morning she was down to a cough & runny nose -- but hey, she's had that since ~November, so we considered her healed. The last load of her laundry is in the dryer now, so I guess we've recovered.

She certainly didn't get sick from too much indoor air yesterday. She and Devon have become quite the team in our yard each evening -- diggin' worms (or as Devon calls it, weeding). Nothing is as cool to Avery as worms, it seems. She builds them a "worm house" (i.e. dirt hole) and lets them watch big screen TV all day -- or at least that's what she tells us they are doing in their worm house. Most of her playing involves moving a worm from underneath the weed Devon is pulling to the "worm house" hole. Devon was thrilled to find a long handled weed puller, and has been doing an hour or two in the yard every night. It's part spring cleaning, and part stress reliever at the end of a long work day. In fact, I do get a little concerned about how excited he can get about pulling big weeds out, full roots and all. But hey, I can't complain!

On the Jordan front, she's been sick all week. She was screaming and miserable for a couple of days, but it wasn't until Thursday when she was lethargic & sleepy all day that I dragged her down to ruin her pediatrician's lunch hour for approximately the 100th time in 16 months. After she's been sick & miserable for a few days I tend to freak out when she settles down and just sleeps. And often we end up in the hospital after the "calm" day, so I was determined to preempt that.

The good news is that her lungs are fine, and that I got to learn & see the difference between an infected ear & a normal one. Infected: tomato red, Normal: pearly grey-ish. So, now she's on Amoxicilan, again, and seems to be bouncing back again. I hope I don't loose my parenting license over the ear infection ordeal.

Jordan also had a Feeding Clinic appointment on Wednesday. We're going to take her off baby formula and start a food formula (Compleat -- as soon as we can hopefully get the insurance sorted out, since it's quite expensive). And, she drank a bit of Pedialyte from a Haberman, so we had to get one of those, and ate some applesauce from a mesh feeder, so now we have a stack of prunes, sweet potatoes, applesauce, & bananas & two mesh feeders all ready to go. We'll see. Things always go better than usual whenever we're at feeding clinic (could be the 7 to 1 ratio, I suppose).

The physiatrist & occupational therapist are concerned about her feet & ankles, so we're going to find out about getting her AFOs (ankle-foot orthoses) to try to keep them straight. Just one more piece of equipment. . . . Of course they'll have to be custom made for her feet, so she should outgrow them in a couple of months. I wonder how many sets of those the insurance company will splurge for in a year?

I better get some sleep so I can take good care of my kiddos tomorrow and try to keep my parenting license. . . .